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dp1 LSAintro
dp1 LSAintro
Peter W. Foltz
Department of Psychology
New Mexico State University
Darrell Laham
Department of Psychology
University of Colorado at Boulder,
Abstract
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the
contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of
text (Landauer and Dumais, 1997). The underlying idea is that the aggregate of all the word
contexts in which a given word does and does not appear provides a set of mutual
constraints that largely determines the similarity of meaning of words and sets of words to
each other. The adequacy of LSAs reflection of human knowledge has been established in
a variety of ways. For example, its scores overlap those of humans on standard vocabulary
and subject matter tests; it mimics human word sorting and category judgments; it simulates
wordword and passageword lexical priming data; and, as reported in 3 following articles
in this issue, it accurately estimates passage coherence, learnability of passages by
individual students, and the quality and quantity of knowledge contained in an essay.
Research reported in the three articles that followFoltz, Kintsch & Landauer (1998/this
issue), Rehder, et al. (1998/this issue), and Wolfe, et al. (1998/this issue)exploits a new
theory of knowledge induction and representation (Landauer and Dumais, 1996, 1997) that
provides a method for determining the similarity of meaning of words and passages by
analysis of large text corpora. After processing a large sample of machine-readable
language, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) represents the words used in it, and any set of
these wordssuch as a sentence, paragraph, or essayeither taken from the original
corpus or new, as points in a very high (e.g. 50-1,500) dimensional semantic space.
LSA is closely related to neural net models, but is based on singular value decomposition, a
mathematical matrix decomposition technique closely akin to factor analysis that is
applicable to text corpora approaching the volume of relevant language experienced by
people.
Word and passage meaning representations derived by LSA have been found
capable of simulating a variety of human cognitive phenomena, ranging from
developmental acquisition of recognition vocabulary to word-categorization, sentence-word
semantic priming, discourse comprehension, and judgments of essay quality. Several of
these simulation results will be summarized briefly below, and additional applications will
be reported in detail in following articles by Peter Foltz, Walter Kintsch, Thomas
Landauer, and their colleagues. We will explain here what LSA is and describe what it
does.
LSA can be construed in two ways: (1) simply as a practical expedient for obtaining
approximate estimates of the contextual usage substitutability of words in larger text
segments, and of the kinds ofas yet incompletely specified meaning similarities among
words and text segments that such relations may reflect, or (2) as a model of the
computational processes and representations underlying substantial portions of the
acquisition and utilization of knowledge. We next sketch both views.
As a practical method for the characterization of word meaning, we know that LSA
produces measures of word-word, word-passage and passage-passage relations that are
well correlated with several human cognitive phenomena involving association or semantic
similarity. Empirical evidence of this will be reviewed shortly. The correlations
demonstrate close resemblance between what LSA extracts and the way peoples
representations of meaning reflect what they have read and heard, as well as the way
human representation of meaning is reflected in the word choice of writers. As one
practical consequence of this correspondence, LSA allows us to closely approximate
human judgments of meaning similarity between words and to objectively predict the
consequences of overall word-based similarity between passages, estimates of which often
figure prominently in research on discourse processing.
It is important to note from the start that the similarity estimates derived by LSA are
not simple contiguity frequencies, co-occurrence counts, or correlations in usage, but
depend on a powerful mathematical analysis that is capable of correctly inferring much
deeper relations (thus the phrase Latent Semantic), and as a consequence are often much
better predictors of human meaning-based judgments and performance than are the surface
level contingencies that have long been rejected (or, as Burgess and Lund, 1996 and this
volume, show, unfairly maligned) by linguists as the basis of language phenomena.
LSA, as currently practiced, induces its representations of the meaning of words
and passages from analysis of text alone. None of its knowledge comes directly from
perceptual information about the physical world, from instinct, or from experiential
intercourse with bodily functions, feelings and intentions. Thus its representation of reality
is bound to be somewhat sterile and bloodless. However, it does take in descriptions and
verbal outcomes of all these juicy processes, and so far as writers have put such things into
words, or that their words have reflected such matters unintentionally, LSA has at least
potential access to knowledge about them. The representations of passages that LSA forms
can be interpreted as abstractions of episodes, sometimes of episodes of purely verbal
content such as philosophical arguments, and sometimes episodes from real or imagined
life coded into verbal descriptions. Its representation of words, in turn, is intertwined with
and mutually interdependent with its knowledge of episodes. Thus while LSAs potential
knowledge is surely imperfect, we believe it can offer a close enough approximation to
peoples knowledge to underwrite theories and tests of theories of cognition. (One might
consider LSA's maximal knowledge of the world to be analogous to a well-read nuns
knowledge of sex, a level of knowledge often deemed a sufficient basis for advising the
young.)
However, LSA as currently practiced has some additional limitations. It makes no
use of word order, thus of syntactic relations or logic, or of morphology. Remarkably, it
manages to extract correct reflections of passage and word meanings quite well without
these aids, but it must still be suspected of resulting incompleteness or likely error on some
occasions.
LSA differs from some statistical approaches discussed in other articles in this issue
and elsewhere in two significant respects. First, the input data "associations" from which
LSA induces representations are between unitary expressions of meaningwords and
complete meaningful utterances in which they occurrather than between successive
words. That is, LSA uses as its initial data not just the summed contiguous pairwise (or
tuple-wise) co-occurrences of words but the detailed patterns of occurrences of very many
words over very large numbers of local meaning-bearing contexts, such as sentences or
paragraphs, treated as unitary wholes. Thus it skips over how the order of words produces
the meaning of a sentence to capture only how differences in word choice and differences
in passage meanings are related.
Another way to think of this is that LSA represents the meaning of a word as a kind
of average of the meaning of all the passages in which it appears, and the meaning of a
passage as a kind of average of the meaning of all the words it contains. LSA's ability to
simultaneouslyconjointlyderive representations of these two interrelated kinds of
meaning depends on an aspect of its mathematical machinery that is its second important
property. LSA assumes that the choice of dimensionality in which all of the local wordcontext relations are simultaneously represented can be of great importance, and that
reducing the dimensionality (the number parameters by which a word or passage is
described) of the observed data from the number of initial contexts to a much smallerbut
still largenumber will often produce much better approximations to human cognitive
relations. It is this dimensionality reduction step, the combining of surface information into
a deeper abstraction, that captures the mutual implications of words and passages. Thus, an
important component of applying the technique is finding the optimal dimensionality for the
final representation. A possible interpretation of this step, in terms more familiar to
researchers in psycholinguistics, is that the resulting dimensions of description are
analogous to the semantic features often postulated as the basis of word meaning, although
establishing concrete relations to mentalisticly interpretable features poses daunting
technical and conceptual problems and has not yet been much attempted.
Finally, LSA, unlike many other methods, employs a preprocessing step in which
the overall distribution of a word over its usage contexts, independent of its correlations
with other words, is first taken into account; pragmatically, this step improves LSAs
results considerably.
However, as mentioned previously, there is another, quite different way to think
about LSA. Landauer and Dumais (1997) have proposed that LSA constitutes a
fundamental computational theory of the acquisition and representation of knowledge. They
maintain that its underlying mechanism can account for a long-standing and important
mystery, the inductive property of learning by which people acquire much more knowledge
knowledge.) Thus, we propose to researchers in discourse processing not only that they
use LSA to expedite their investigations, but that they join in the project of testing,
developing and exploring its fundamental theoretical implications and limits.
What is LSA?
LSA is a fully automatic mathematical/statistical technique for extracting and inferring
relations of expected contextual usage of words in passages of discourse. It is not a
traditional natural language processing or artificial intelligence program; it uses no humanly
constructed dictionaries, knowledge bases, semantic networks, grammars, syntactic
parsers, or morphologies, or the like, and takes as its input only raw text parsed into words
defined as unique character strings and separated into meaningful passages or samples such
as sentences or paragraphs.
The first step is to represent the text as a matrix in which each row stands for a
unique word and each column stands for a text passage or other context. Each cell contains
the frequency with which the word of its row appears in the passage denoted by its
column. Next, the cell entries are subjected to a preliminary transformation, whose details
we will describe later, in which each cell frequency is weighted by a function that expresses
both the words importance in the particular passage and the degree to which the word type
carries information in the domain of discourse in general.
Next, LSA applies singular value decomposition (SVD) to the matrix. This is a
form of factor analysis, or more properly the mathematical generalization of which factor
analysis is a special case. In SVD, a rectangular matrix is decomposed into the product of
three other matrices. One component matrix describes the original row entities as vectors of
derived orthogonal factor values, another describes the original column entities in the same
way, and the third is a diagonal matrix containing scaling values such that when the three
components are matrix-multiplied, the original matrix is reconstructed. There is a
mathematical proof that any matrix can be so decomposed perfectly, using no more factors
than the smallest dimension of the original matrix. When fewer than the necessary number
of factors are used, the reconstructed matrix is a least-squares best fit. One can reduce the
dimensionality of the solution simply by deleting coefficients in the diagonal matrix,
ordinarily starting with the smallest. (In practice, for computational reasons, for very large
corpora only a limited number of dimensionscurrently a few thousand can be
constructed.)
Here is a small example that gives the flavor of the analysis and demonstrates what
the technique accomplishes. This example uses as text passages the titles of nine technical
memoranda, five about human computer interaction (HCI), and four about mathematical
graph theory, topics that are conceptually rather disjoint. Thus the original matrix has nine
columns, and we have given it 12 rows, each corresponding to a content word used in at
least two of the titles. The titles, with the extracted terms italicized, and the corresponding
word-by-document matrix is shown in Figure 1.1 We will discuss the highlighted parts
of the tables in due course.
The linear decomposition is shown next (Figure 2); except for rounding errors, its
multiplication perfectly reconstructs the original as illustrated.
Next we show a reconstruction based on just two dimensions (Figure 3) that
approximates the original matrix. This uses vector elements only from the first two,
shaded, columns of the three matrices shown in the previous figure (which is equivalent to
setting all but the highest two values in S to zero).
Each value in this new representation has been computed as a linear combination of
values on the two retained dimensions, which in turn were computed as linear
combinations of the original cell values. Note, therefore, that if we were to change the entry
in any one cell of the original, the values in the reconstruction with reduced dimensions
This example has been used in several previous publications (e.g. Deerwester et al., 1990;
Landauer & Dumais, in press).
might be changed everywhere; this is the mathematical sense in which LSA performs
inference or induction.
Example of text data: Titles of Some Technical Memos
c1:
c2:
c3:
c4:
c5:
m1:
m2:
m3:
m4:
{ X} =
human
interface
computer
user
system
response
time
EPS
survey
trees
graph
minors
c1
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
c2
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
0
1
0
0
0
c3
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
c4
1
0
0
0
2
0
0
1
0
0
0
0
c5
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
0
m1
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
0
m2
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
m3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
m4
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
r (human.user) = -.38
r (human.minors) = -.29
Figure 1. A word by context matrix, X, formed from the titles of five articles about
human-computer interaction and four about graph theory. Cell entries are the
number of times that a word (rows) appeared in a title (columns) for words that
appeared in at least two titles.
10
11
The dimension reduction step has collapsed the component matrices in such a way
that words that occurred in some contexts now appear with greater or lesser estimated
frequency, and some that did not appear originally now do appear, at least fractionally.
{ X} = {W }{S}{P}'
{W } =
0.22
0.20
0.24
0.40
0.64
0.27
0.27
0.30
0.21
0.01
0.04
0.03
-0.11
-0.07
0.04
0.06
-0.17
0.11
0.11
-0.14
0.27
0.49
0.62
0.45
0.29
0.14
-0.16
-0.34
0.36
-0.43
-0.43
0.33
-0.18
0.23
0.22
0.14
-0.41
-0.55
-0.59
0.10
0.33
0.07
0.07
0.19
-0.03
0.03
0.00
-0.01
-0.11
0.28
-0.11
0.33
-0.16
0.08
0.08
0.11
-0.54
0.59
-0.07
-0.30
-0.34
0.50
-0.25
0.38
-0.21
-0.17
-0.17
0.27
0.08
-0.39
0.11
0.28
0.52
-0.07
-0.30
0.00
-0.17
0.28
0.28
0.03
-0.47
-0.29
0.16
0.34
-0.06
-0.01
0.06
0.00
0.03
-0.02
-0.02
-0.02
-0.04
0.25
-0.68
0.68
-0.41
-0.11
0.49
0.01
0.27
-0.05
-0.05
-0.17
-0.58
-0.23
0.23
0.18
{S} =
3.34
2.54
2.35
1.64
1.50
1.31
0.85
0.56
0.36
{P} =
0.20
-0.06
0.11
-0.95
0.05
-0.08
0.18
-0.01
-0.06
0.61
0.17
-0.50
-0.03
-0.21
-0.26
-0.43
0.05
0.24
0.46
-0.13
0.21
0.04
0.38
0.72
-0.24
0.01
0.02
0.54
-0.23
0.57
0.27
-0.21
-0.37
0.26
-0.02
-0.08
0.28
0.11
-0.51
0.15
0.33
0.03
0.67
-0.06
-0.26
0.00
0.19
0.10
0.02
0.39
-0.30
-0.34
0.45
-0.62
0.01
0.44
0.19
0.02
0.35
-0.21
-0.15
-0.76
0.02
0.02
0.62
0.25
0.01
0.15
0.00
0.25
0.45
0.52
0.08
0.53
0.08
-0.03
-0.60
0.36
0.04
-0.07
-0.45
{X } =
human
interface
computer
user
system
response
time
EPS
survey
trees
graph
minors
c1
0.16
0.14
0.15
0.26
0.45
0.16
0.16
0.22
0.10
-0.06
-0.06
-0.04
c2
0.40
0.37
0.51
0.84
1.23
0.58
0.58
0.55
0.53
0.23
0.34
0.25
c3
0.38
0.33
0.36
0.61
1.05
0.38
0.38
0.51
0.23
-0.14
-0.15
-0.10
c4
0.47
0.40
0.41
0.70
1.27
0.42
0.42
0.63
0.21
-0.27
-0.30
-0.21
c5
0.18
0.16
0.24
0.39
0.56
0.28
0.28
0.24
0.27
0.14
0.20
0.15
m1
-0.05
-0.03
0.02
0.03
-0.07
0.06
0.06
-0.07
0.14
0.24
0.31
0.22
m2
-0.12
-0.07
0.06
0.08
-0.15
0.13
0.13
-0.14
0.31
0.55
0.69
0.50
12
m3
-0.16
-0.10
0.09
0.12
-0.21
0.19
0.19
-0.20
0.44
0.77
0.98
0.71
r (human.user) = .94
r (human.minors) = -.83
Figure 3. Two dimensional reconstruction of original matrix shown in Fig. 1 based
on shaded columns and rows from SVD as shown in Fig. 2. Comparing shaded
and boxed rows and cells of Figs. 1 and 3 illustrates how LSA induces similarity
relations by changing estimated entries up or down to accommodate mutual
constraints in the data.
Look at the two shaded cells for survey and trees in column m4. The word tree did not
appear in this graph theory title. But because m4 did contain graph and minors, the zero
entry for tree has been replaced with 0.66, which can be viewed as an estimate of how
many times it would occur in each of an infinite sample of titles containing graph and
minors. By contrast, the value 1.00 for survey, which appeared once in m4, has been
replaced by 0.42 reflecting the fact that it is unexpected in this context and should be
counted as unimportant in characterizing the passage. Very roughly and
anthropomorphically, in constructing the reduced dimensional representation, SVD, with
only values along two orthogonal dimensions to go on, has to estimate what words actually
appear in each context by using only the information it has extracted. It does that by saying
the following:
m4
-0.09
-0.04
0.12
0.19
-0.05
0.22
0.22
-0.11
0.42
0.66
0.85
0.62
13
This text segment is best described as having so much of abstract concept one and
so much of abstract concept two, and this word has so much of concept one and so
much of concept two, and combining those two pieces of information (by vector
arithmetic), my best guess is that word X actually appeared 0.6 times in context Y.
Now let us consider what such changes may do to the imputed relations between
words or between multi-word textual passages. For two examples of word-word relations,
compare the shaded and/or boxed rows for the words human, user and minors (in this
context, minor is a technical term from graph theory) in the original and in the twodimensionally reconstructed matrices (Figures 1 and 3). In the original, human never
appears in the same passage with either user or minorsthey have no co-occurrences,
contiguities or associations as often construed. The correlations (using Spearman r to
facilitate familiar interpretation) are -.38 between human and user, and a slightly higher .29 between human and minors. However, in the reconstructed two-dimensional
approximation, because of their indirect relations, both have been greatly altered: the
human-user correlation has gone up to .94, the human-minors correlation down to -.83.
Thus, because the terms human and user occur in contexts of similar meaningeven
though never in the same passagethe reduced dimension solution represents them as
more similar, while the opposite is true of human and minors.
To examine what the dimension reduction has done to relations between titles, we
computed the intercorrelations between each title and all the others, first based on the raw
co-occurrence data, then on the corresponding vectors representing titles in the twodimensional reconstruction; see Figure 4.
In the raw co-occurrence data, correlations among the 5 human-computer
interaction titles were generally low, even though all the papers were ostensibly about quite
similar topics; half the rs were zero, three were negative, two were moderately positive,
and the average was only .02. The correlations among the four graph theory papers were
mixed, with a moderate mean r of 0.44. Correlations between the HCI and graph theory
papers averaged only a modest -.30 despite the minimal conceptual overlap of the two
topics.
14
c1
-0.19
0.00
0.00
-0.33
-0.17
-0.26
-0.33
-0.33
c2
c3
c4
c5
0.00
0.00
0.58
-0.30
-0.45
-0.58
-0.19
0.47
0.00
-0.21
-0.32
-0.41
-0.41
-0.31
-0.16
-0.24
-0.31
-0.31
-0.17
-0.26
-0.33
-0.33
0.67
0.52
-0.17
0.77
0.26
0.56
0.81
-0.88
-0.88
-0.88
-0.84
-0.45
-0.44
-0.44
-0.37
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
0.02
-0.30
m1
m2
m3
0.44
0.91
1.00
1.00
0.85
-0.85
-0.85
-0.85
-0.81
0.91
0.88
0.99
-0.56
-0.56
-0.56
-0.50
0.92
-0.72
1.00
0.85
-0.85
-0.85
-0.85
-0.81
1.00
In the two dimensional reconstruction the topical groupings are much clearer. Most
dramatically, the average r between HCI titles increases from .02 to .92. This happened,
not because the HCI titles were generally similar to each other in the raw data, which they
were not, but because they contrasted with the non-HCI titles in the same ways. Similarly,
the correlations among the graph theory titles were re-estimated to be all 1.00, and those
between the two classes of topic were now strongly negative, mean r = -.72.
Thus, SVD has performed a number of reasonable inductions; it has inferred what
the true pattern of occurrences and relations must be for the words in titles if all the original
15
data are to be accommodated in two dimensions. In this case, the inferences appear to be
intuitively sensible. Note that much of the information that LSA used to infer relations
among words and passages is in data about passages in which particular words did not
occur. Indeed, Landauer and Dumais (1997) found that in LSA simulations of schoolchild
word knowledge acquisition, about three-fourths of the gain in total comprehension
vocabulary that results from reading a paragraph is indirectly inferred knowledge about
words not in the paragraph at all, a result that offers an explanation of children's otherwise
inexplicably rapid growth of vocabulary. A rough analogy of how this can happen is as
follows. Read the following sentence:
John is Bob's father and Mary is Ann's mother.
Now read this one:
Mary is Bob's mother.
Because of the relations between the words mother, father, son, daughter, brother and
sister that you already knew, adding the second sentence probably tended to make you
think that that Bob and Ann were brother and sister, Ann the daughter of John, John the
father of Ann, and Bob the son of Mary, even though none of these relations is explicitly
expressed (and none follow necessarily from the presumed formal rules of English kinship
naming.) The relationships inferred by LSA are also not logically defined, nor are they
assumed to be consciously rationalizable as these could be. Instead, they are relations only
of similarityor of context sensitive similaritybut they nevertheless have mutual
entailments of the same general nature, and also give rise to fuzzy indirect inferences that
may be weak or strong and logically right or wrong.
Why, and under what circumstances should reducing the dimensionality of
representation be beneficial; when, in general, will such inferences be better than the
original first-order data? We hypothesize that one such case is when the original data are
16
generated from a source of the same dimensionality and general structure as the
reconstruction. Suppose, for example, that speakers or writers generate paragraphs by
choosing words from a k-dimensional space in such a way that words in the same
paragraph tend to be selected from nearby locations. If listeners or readers try to infer the
similarity of meaning from these data, they will do better if they reconstruct the full set of
relations in the same number of dimensions as the source. Among other things, given the
right analysis, this will allow the system to infer that two words from nearby locations in
semantic space have similar meanings even though they are never used in the same
passage, or that they have quite different meanings even though they often occur in the
same utterances.
The number of dimensions retained in LSA is an empirical issue. Because the
underlying principle is that the original data should not be perfectly regenerated but, rather,
an optimal dimensionality should be found that will cause correct induction of underlying
relations, the customary factor-analytic approach of choosing a dimensionality that most
parsimoniously represent the true variance of the original data is not appropriate. Instead
some external criterion of validity is sought, such as the performance on a synonym test or
prediction of the missing words in passages if some portion are deleted in forming the
initial matrix. (See Britton & Sorrells, this issue, for another approach to determining the
correct dimensions for representing knowledge.)
Finally, the measure of similarity computed in the reduced dimensional space is
usually, but not always, the cosine between vectors. Empirically, this measure tends to
work well, and there are some weak theoretical grounds for preferring it (see Landauer &
Dumais, 1997). Sometimes we have found the additional use of the length of LSA vectors,
which reflects how much was said about a topic rather than how central the discourse was
to the topic, to be useful as well (see Rehder et al., this volume).
17
18
and are necessarily noisy. Therefore, studies using them require the use of replicate cases
and statistical treatment in a manner similar to human data.
Kintsch (1998) has also used LSA derived meaning representations to demonstrate their
possible role in construction-integration-theoretic accounts of sentence comprehension,
19
metaphor and context effects in decision making. We will take space here to review only
some of the most systematic and pertinent of these results.
20
performance ranged from just equivalent to the best prior methods up to about 30% better.
In a recent project sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, LSI
was compared with a large number of other research prototypes and commercial retrieval
schemes. Direct quantitative comparisons among the many systems were somewhat
muddied by the use of varying amounts of preprocessingthings like getting rid of
typographical errors, identifying proper nouns as special, differences in stop lists, and the
amount of tuning that systems were given before the final test runs. Nevertheless, the
results appeared to be quite similar to earlier ones. Compared to the standard vector
method (essentially LSI without dimension reductions) ceteris paribus LSI was a 16%
improvement (Dumais, 1994). LSI has also been used successfully to match reviewers
with papers to be reviewed based on samples of the reviewers own papers (Dumais &
Nielsen, 1992), and to select papers for researchers to read based on other papers they have
liked (Foltz and Dumais, 1992).
21
Nonetheless, the relationship between some close neighbors in LSA space can
occasionally be mysterious (e.g., verbally and sadomasochism with a cosine of .8
from the encyclopedia space), and some pairs that should be close are not. It's impossible
to say exactly why these oddities occur, but it is plausible that some words that have more
than one contextual meaning receive a sort of average high-dimensional placement that out
of context signifies nothing, and that many words are sampled too thinly to get well placed.
It must be born in mind that most of the training corpora used to date correspond in size
approximately to the printed word exposure (only) of a single average 9th grade student,
and individual humans also have frequent oddities in their understanding of particular
words. (Investigators who use LSA vectors should keep these factors in mind: the
similarities should be expected to reflect human similarities only when averaged over many
word or passages pairs of a particular type and when compared to averages across a
number of people; they will not always give sensible results when applied to the particular
words in a particular sentence.) It's also likely, of course, that LSAs "bag of words"
method, which ignores all syntactical, logical and nonlinguistic pragmatic entailments,
sometimes misses meaning or gets it scrambled.
To objectively measure how well, compared to people, LSA captures synonymy,
LSA's knowledge of synonyms was assessed with a standard vocabulary test. The 80 item
test was taken from retired versions of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Test of
English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL: for which we are indebted to Larry Frase and
ETS). To make these comparisons, LSA was trained by running the SVD analysis on a
large corpus of representative English. In various studies, collections of newspaper text
from the Associated Press news wire and Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia (a
work intended for students), and a representative collection of childrens reading2 have
2
We thank Stephen Ivens and Touchstone Applied Science Associates (TASA) of Brewster,
New York for providing this valuable resource. The corpus, which was used in the production of
The Educators Word Frequency Guide (Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995), consists of
representative random samples of text of all kinds read by students in each grade through first
year of college in the United States. In the machine-readable form in which we received it,
22
been used. In one experiment, an SVD was performed on text segments consisting of 500
characters or less (on average 73 words, about a paragraphs worth) taken from beginning
portions of each of 30,473 articles in the encyclopedia, a total of 4.5 million words of text,
roughly equivalent to what a child would have read by the end of eighth grade. This
resulted in a vector for each of 60 thousand words.
The TOEFL vocabulary test consists of items in which the question part is usually a
single word, and there are four alternative answers, usually single words, from which the
test taker is supposed to choose the one most similar in meaning. To simulate human
performance, the cosine between the question word and each alternative was calculated,
and the LSA model chose the alternative closest to the stem. For six test items for which the
model had never met either the stem word and/or the correct alternative, it guessed with
probability .25. Scored this way, LSA got 65% correct, identical to the average score of a
large sample of students applying for college entrance in the United States from nonEnglish speaking countries.
The detailed pattern of errors of LSA was also compared to that of students. For
each question a product-moment correlation coefficient was computed between (i) the
cosine of the stem and each alternative and (j) the proportion of guesses for each alternative
for a large sample of students (n > 1,000 for every test item). The average correlation
across the 80 items was 0.70. Excluding the correct alternative, the average correlation
was .44. These correlations may be thought of as between one test-taker (LSA) and group
norms, which would also be much less than perfect for humans. When LSA chose
wrongly and most students chose correctly, it sometimes appeared to be because LSA is
more sensitive to contextual or paradigmatic associations and less to contrastive semantic or
syntagmatic features. For example, LSA slightly preferred nurse (cos = .47) to doctor
(cos = .41) as an associate for physician.
t h e corpus contains approximately 11 million word tokens of text. It is one of the corpora on
which LSA vectors and text similarity measures available through our Web site
http://LSA.colorado.eduare based.
23
To assess the role of dimension reduction, the number of dimensions was varied
from 2 to 1,032 (the largest number for which SVD was computationally feasible.) On loglinear coordinates, the TOEFL test results showed a very sharp and highly significant peak
(Figure 5). Corrected for guessing by the standard formula ((correct - chance)/(1chance)), LSA got 52.7% correct with 300 and 325 dimensions, 13.5% correct with just
two or three dimensions. When there was no dimension reduction at all (equivalent to
choosing correct answers by the correlation of transformed co-occurrence frequencies of
words over encyclopedia passages), just 15.8%. At optimal dimensionality, LSA chose
approximately three times as many right answers as would be obtained by ordinary firstorder correlations over the input, even after a transformation that greatly improves the
24
relation. This demonstrates conclusively that the LSA dimension reduction technique
captures much more than mere co-occurrence (simply choosing the alternative that cooccurs with the stem in the largest number of corpus paragraphs gets only 11% right when
corrected for guessing). More importantly for our argument, it implies that indirect
associations or structural relations induced by analysis of the whole corpus are involved in
LSAs success with individual words. Thus, correct representation of any one word
depends on the simultaneous correct representation of many, perhaps all other words.
As mentioned earlier, Landauer and Dumais (1997) also estimated, by a different
method, the relative direct and indirect effects of adding a new paragraph to LSAs
experience. For example, at a point in LSAs learning roughly corresponding to the
amount of text read by late primary school, an imaginary test of all words in the language
the models imputed total recognition vocabularygains about three times as much
knowledge about words not in the new paragraph as about words actually contained in the
paragraph.
Landauer and Dumais (1997) also found that the rate of gain in vocabulary by LSA
was approximately equal to the rate of gain of known, as compared to morphologically
inferred, words empirically estimated by Anglin (1995) and others for primary school
children.
25
versus concrete similarity relations. Anglin measured the semantic similarity of every pair
of words by the proportion of subjects who put them in the same pile. He found that parts
of speech clustered moderately in both child and adult sets, and, confirming the hypothesis
behind the study, that adults showed more evidence of use of abstract categories than did
children.
Laham and Landauer measured the similarity between the same word pairs by
cosines based on 5 grade-partitioned scalings of samples of schoolchild reading3rd, 6th,
9th, 12th grade and college. 3 For each scaling, the cosine between each word pair in the set
(20 words for 190 comparisons) was calculated. The overall correlation of the LSA
estimates and the grouped human data, for both child and adult, rose as the number of
documents included in the scaling rose. Using the third grade scaling, the correlation
between the LSA estimates and the child data was .50, with the adult data .35. Using the
college level scaling the correlation between LSA estimates and the child data was .61, with
adults .50. The correlation coefficients between LSA estimates and human data showed a
monotonic linear rise as the grade level (and number of documents known to LSA)
increased.
LSA exhibited differences in similarities across degrees of abstraction much like
those found by Anglin; for the third grade scaling, the average correlations in patterns
across means for the comparable levels within each part-of-speech class r = .80 with
children and r = .75 with adults, for the college level scaling r = .90 with children and r =
.90 with adults . The correlation between the adult and child patterns was .95. The LSA
measure did not separate word classes nearly as strongly as did the human data, nor did it
as clearly distinguish within part-of-speech from between part-of-speech comparisons. For
the third grade scaling, the overall (N = 190) average cosine =.13, the average within partof-speech cosine (N = 41) = .15 and the average between part-of-speech cosine (N = 149)
= .13. The college level scaling showed stronger similarities within class with the overall
3
26
average cosine =.19, the average within part-of-speech cosine = .23 and the average
between part-of-speech cosine = .17.
As in the vocabulary acquisition simulations, it appears that the relations obtained
from a corpus of small size relative to a typical adults cumulative language exposure
resemble children somewhat more than adults. LSAs weak reflection of word class in this
rather small sample of data would appear to confirm the expectation that the lack of word
order information in its input data along with the use of fairly large passages as the context
units prevents it from inducing grammatical relations among words. (Wolfe et al.,
1998/this issue, reports further word sorting results. Also compare Burgess et al, 1998/this
issue.)
27
relatedness of the concept pairs. The LSA predictions correlated significantly with the
subjects, with the correlation stronger to that of the experts in the domain (r = 0.41) than
that of the novices (r = 0.36). (Note again that two human ratings would also not correlated
perfectly.) An analysis of where LSA's predictions deviated greatly from that of the
humans indicated that LSA tended to underpredict more global or situational relationships
that were not directly discussed in the text but would be common historical knowledge of
any undergraduate. Thus in this case the limitation on LSA's predictions may simply be
due to training only on a small set of documents rather than on a larger set that would
capture a richer representation of history.
28
In the Till et al. study, target words related to both senses of the homographic words were
correctly responded to faster than unrelated control words if presented within 100 ms after
the homograph. If delayed by 300 ms, only the context-appropriate associate was primed.
At a one second delay, the so-called inference words were also primed. In the LSA
simulation, the cosines between the polysemic word and its two associates were computed
to mimic the expected initial priming. The cosine between the two associates of the
polysemic word and the sentence up to the last word preceding it were used to mimic
contextual disambiguation of the homographs. The cosine between the entire passages and
the inference words were computed to emulate the contextual comprehension effect on their
priming.
Table 1 shows the average results over all 27 passage pairs, with one of the above
example passages shown again to illustrate the conditions simulated. The values given are
the cosines between the word or passage and the target words. The pattern of LSA
similarity relations corresponds almost perfectly with the pattern of priming results; the
differences corresponding to differences observed in the priming data are all significant at p
< .001, and have effect sizes comparable to those in the priming study.
The import of this result is that LSA again emulated a human behavioral relation
between words and multi-word passages, and did so while representing passages simply as
the vector average of their contained words. (Steinhart, 1995, obtained similar results with
different words and passages.) It is surprising and important that such simple
representations of whole utterances, ones that ignore word order, sentence structure, and
non-linear word-word interactions, can correctly predict human behavior based on passage
meaning. However, this is the second example of this propertyquery-abstract and
abstract-abstract similarity results being the firstand there have subsequently been several
more. These findings begin to suggest that word choice alone has a much more dominant
role in the expression of meaning than has previously been credited (see Landauer, Laham
and Foltz, 1997).
29
Table 1
LSA Simulation of Till, Mross, & Kintsch (1988) Priming Study.
Mint:
Money
.21
Candy
.20
Ground
.07
Breath
.21
Ground
.15
30
31
All five methods provided the basis of scores that correlated approximately as well
with expert assigned scores as such scores correlated with each other, sometimes slightly
less well, on average somewhat better. In one set of studies (Laham, 1997a), method one
was applied to a total of eight exams ranging in topic from heart anatomy and physiology,
through psychological concepts, to American history, current social issues and marketing
problems. A meta-analysis found that LSA correlated significantly better with individual
expert graders (from ETS or other professional organization or course instructors) than one
expert correlated with another.
Because these results show that human judgments about essay qualities are no more
reliable than LSAs, they again suggest that the holistic semantic representation of a
passage relies primarily on word choice and surprisingly little on properties whose
transmission necessarily requires the use of syntax. This is good news for the practical
application of LSA to many kinds of discourse processing research, but is counter-intuitive
and at odds with the usual assumptions of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of
meaning and comprehension, so it should be viewed with caution until further research is
done (and, of course, with reservations until the details of the studies have been
published.)
32
propositionalized by hand. This has limited research to small samples of text and has
inhibited its practical application to composition and instruction. Foltz, Kintsch, and
Landauer (1993, this issue; Foltz, 1996) have applied LSA to the task. LSA can make
automatic coherence judgments by computing the cosine from one sentence or passage and
the following one. In one case, analysis of the coherence between a set of sentences about
the heart, the LSA measure predicted comprehension scores extremely well, r= .93. As will
be discussed in the article in this volume, the general approach of using LSA for computing
textual coherence also permits an automatic characterization of places in a text where the
coherence breaks down, as well as a measure of how semantic content changes across a
text.
33
34
rigorous computational simulation that takes in the very same data from which humans
learn about words and passages and produces a representation that gives veridical
simulations of a wide range of human judgments and behavior. While it seems highly
doubtful that the human brain uses the same mathematical algorithms as LSA/SVD, it
seems almost certain that the brain uses as much analytic power as LSA to transform its
temporally local experiences into global knowledge. The present theory clearly does not
account for all aspects of knowledge and cognition, but it offers a potential path for
development of new accounts of mind that can be stated in mathematical terms rather than
imprecise mentalistic primitives and whose empirical implications can be derived
analytically or by computations on bodies of representative data rather than by verbal
argument.
In future research we hope to see both improvements in LSAs experience base
from analysis of larger and more representative corpora of both text and spoken language
and perhaps, if a way can be found, by adding representations of experience of other
kindsand the provision of a compatible process model of online discourse
comprehension by which both its input of experience and its application of constructed
knowledge will better reflect the complex ways in which humans combine word meanings
dynamically. As suggested above, one promising approach to the latter goal is to combine
LSA word and episode representation with the Construction-Integration theorys
mechanisms for discourse comprehension, a strategy that Walter Kintsch illustrates in a
forthcoming book (Kintsch, in press.) Other avenues of potential improvement involve the
representation of word order in the input data for LSA, following the example of the work
reported in Burgess and Lund (this volume).
Meanwhile, it needs keeping in mind that the applications of LSA recounted in the
following articles are all based on its current formulation and based on varying training
corpora that are all smaller and less representative of relevant human experience than one
would wish. Part of the problem of non-optimal corpora is due simply to the current
35
unavailability and difficulty of constructing large general or topically relevant text samples
that approximate what a variety of individual learners would have met. But another is due
to current computational limitations. LSA became practical only when computational
power and algorithm efficiency improved sufficiently to support SVD of thousands of
words-by-thousands of contexts matrices; it is still impossible to perform SVD on the
hundreds of thousands by tens of millions matrices that would be needed to truly represent
the sum of an adults language exposure. It also needs noting that is still early days for
LSA and that many details of its implementation, such as the preprocessing data
transformation used and the method for choosing dimensionality, even the underlying
statistical model, will undoubtedly undergo changes.
Thus in reading the following articles, or in considering the application of LSA to
other problems, one should not think of LSA as a fixed mechanism or its representations as
fixed quantities, but rather, as evolving approximations.
36
REFERENCES
37
38
39
McNamara, D. S., Kintsch, E., Songer B. N., & Kintsch, W. (1996) Are good texts
always better? Interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of
understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14, 1, 1-43.
Rehder, B., Schreiner, M. E., Wolfe, B. W., Laham, D., Landauer, T. K., &
Kintsch, W. (1998/this issue). Using Latent Semantic Analysis to assess knowledge:
Some technical considerations. Discourse Processes, 25, 337-354.
Steinhart, D. J. (1996). Resolving Lexical ambiguity: Does context play a role?
Unpublished masters thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Till, R. E. , Mross, E. F., & Kintsch, W. (1988). Time course of priming for
associate and inference words in discourse context. Memory and Cognition, 16, 283-298.
van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of Discourse Comprehension.
New York: Academic Press.
Wolfe, M. B., Schreiner, M. E., Rehder, B., Laham, D., Foltz, P. W., Kintsch,
W., & Landauer, T. K. (1998/this issue). Learning from text: Matching readers and text
by Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes, 25, 309-336.
Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educators
word frequency guide. Brewster, NY: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.
40
Appendix
The latest information and applications of LSA can be found at our website:
http://LSA.colorado.edu/
41
Author Note